THE HAGUE — Two decades ago, when Ann Cotton, a British educator and philanthropist, started examining the problem of low school enrollment among girls in rural Zimbabwe, she was struck by the crushing poverty, which to her presented an even bigger obstacle to girls’ education than tradition.
Families did not have enough money for school fees, uniforms or books, and would spend what little they had on the education of their sons, who were more likely to get paid jobs.
On Nov. 4, Ms. Cotton was awarded the World Innovation Summit for Education prize for her role as founder and director of Camfed, an organization that has helped millions of young girls in sub-Saharan Africa remain in school.
WISE, which was established by the Qatar Foundation in 2009 in Doha, Qatar, has become one of the leading forums for open discussion on the state of global education. More than 1,500 delegates, including academics, teachers, students and innovators from 107 countries, attended this year’s forum, with an especially large representation of educators from the Middle East and the Southern Hemisphere.
The $500,000 prize was awarded to Ms. Cotton at the meeting’s opening by Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, co-founder and chairwoman of the Qatar Foundation, and the wife of the former emir of Qatar.
Ms. Cotton’s early experience in Zimbabwe led her to the conclusion that direct sponsorship would help ensure that more girls attended school, a realization that motivated her to found Camfed in 1993.
She began by getting financial aid for a few dozen students. The organization has grown substantially since then and has supported more than 1.2 million students in Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
More than three million students have benefited from the improved learning environments that are an indirect result of Camfed’s work.
Besides financially supporting students, the organization trains teachers, mentors and community activists. It has also created a 25,000-member network of Camfed graduates who use their own experiences to teach and advise their communities, something the organization calls a virtuous cycle.
Providing universal primary education for children has been declared one of the goals of the United Nation’s post-2015 development framework, and technological advances promise to shake the foundations of even the poorest education systems. The announcement of the education prize on the first day of WISE’s sixth world summit meeting, in a year when Kailash Satyarthi of India and Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their fight to bring education to all children, put the topic of children’s education, especially for girls, at the forefront of the discussion.
There is a feeling, a zeitgeist, a global awareness around this issue, and we have to take advantage it, Ms. Cotton said in a telephone interview from Cambridge, England, the week before the prize was announced.
This sentiment was shared by others who attended the meeting.
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Fifteen years ago, you would have to explain to people why girls’ education is important, said Safeena Husain, founder and chief executive of the Indian nonprofit Educate Girls. Now the issue of education and gender is ripe.
It’s been these positive stories and also these incredibly horrific stories that have brought a sense of urgency to the issue, Ms. Husain said, referring to a recent spate of violent crimes directed against women and girls in India.
Ms. Husain, who spoke on a panel on motivating young pupils, founded Educate Girls in 2007. Her organization works with nearly 5,700 schools in the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan to eliminate the gender gap in primary schools.
Ahead of this year’s meeting, the theme of which was creativity, the Qatar Foundation conducted a survey on schools in the year 2030.
The results of the survey were released on the eve of the gathering, which led to extensive discussions on the evolution of global education and the factors that are likely to shape it in the future.
We are facing, as a planet, huge challenges in terms of environmental and technological change, said Keri Facer, a professor of education at the University of Bristol, in Britain. These are not things that are confined to the border.
Professor Facer was on a panel discussing the future of education degrees in a world where the opportunities to engage in higher learning have become uncoupled from conventional degree- or diploma-granting institutions, notably through the growth of massive open online courses, commonly known as MOOCs.
The Qatar Foundation survey, School in 2030, was carried out among 645 education experts this past summer. The majority of participants predicted that certification by companies, or peer-review mechanisms — like those already offered on some business-oriented social networks such as LinkedIn — would replace academic diplomas in the future as indicators of a person’s level of education or qualifications.
Nearly half agreed that by 2030, most of what students learn will come from online, with 73 percent saying the role of the teacher would shift toward a guide and mentor for students and away from the traditional role as the source of knowledge, a role predicted by only 19 percent.